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NEW YORK - A man wanted in the attack of a gay couple in the Chelsea section of Manhattan (NYC) last month has been arrested. Bayna-Lehkiem El-Amin, 41, turned himself into police Tuesday. He faced a judge on two counts of felony assault and two counts of attempted felony assault. A judge set bail at $75,000. The May 5 assault at a Dallas BBQ on West 23rd Street was caught on video. The scary and wild attack unfolded as stunned diners looked on, some yelling "Stop!" A man is seen slamming a chair onto a gay couple then running off....

Nine graffiti artists who spray painted creations across the world-renowned 5Pointz building filed a lawsuit Friday in Brooklyn federal court, seeking unspecified damages from the owner who whitewashed away their artwork. [Snip] The aerosol artists say they are owed substantial cash damages because Wolkoff painted over their al fresco works. [Snip] The iconic buildings had more than 350 works of visual art on the walls — inside and out — when Wolkoff destroyed them, the lawsuit said. The colorful, eye-catching creations were torn down for good last summer.

Security Expert: Feds Involved In Day-To-Day Busts Isn't Something Seen Every Day. Bullet-riddled windows, yellow crime scene tape, and evidence markers denoting where shell casings fell on the sidewalk are becoming all-too-familiar sights on New York City streets. Now in an unprecedented move, a federal agency is joining the effort to get gun crimes under control, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported Monday. Kramer is told it was a collective decision made by the federal government, the NYPD, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Those agencies are mounting a...

Paralysis and “paranoia’’ brought on by US Attorney Preet Bharara’s ongoing corruption probe have come to define Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration with just seven days to go in the legislative session, a worried Cuomo ally and others have told The Post.

Full title: De Blasio says if rent-regulated apartments law expires it would be 'end to New York City as we have known it' The “end to New York City as we have known it" could be upon us if Albany fails to act and renew rent laws governing 1 million rent-regulated units, Mayor de Blasio said on Friday. In an unusually apocalyptic conference call with 14,000 AARP members, de Blasio said the laws — which expire Monday — are the only things keeping landlords from jacking up rents to market rates, often double what tenants currently pay.

New York City's top cop is demanding a retraction after he was quoted by a news article saying the NYPD has a hard time hiring black officers because "so many of them have spent time in jail," according to a published report. The Daily News reports that Commissioner Bill Bratton has called on the Guardian to retract the story -- which bears the headline "NYPD chief Bratton says hiring black officers is difficult: ‘So many have spent time in jail,’ -- because his comments were taken out of context from another story published by the British news outlet about the...

Barbara Tasch June 10, 2015 New York police commissioner William Bratton said he'd like to hire more non-white officers but most of them have criminal records and therefore, he can't, The Guardian reported. “We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them," Bratton said in an interview with the publication. For this high number, Bratton blamed the "unfortunate consequences" of stop-and-frisk policing carried out on young non-white men over the last few years in New York. A felony conviction, domestic violence charges,...

Right now, there are about 800 Muslim uniformed police officers out of about 35,000, according to the NYPD Muslim Officers Society. Of those, only about 20 are higher ranked officials. Lt. Adeel Rana, commanding officer of the community affairs immigration outreach unit, said there has been a slow increase over the past decade, but it has been rapidly changing in the past year and a half. "It's changing every day; we are getting more and more recruits," he said. "And as they see people of their own religion in uniform, their eyes brighten." There has been an effort to increase openness and...

It’s time for a sense of proportion about the increase in shootings and murders in New York City in the first five months of 2015. While it’s true that both categories have risen over last year’s low numbers, the increase is not a harbinger of collapsing law enforcement or crime raging out of control, as some local columnists would have it. Nor is it evidence that the steep decrease over the past four years in reasonable-suspicion stops — or “stop-and-frisks,” as they’re colloquially known — has caused the increase in shootings.

They’re New York’s Nicest. City cops have racked up fewer complaints from citizens so far this year compared to the same period in 2014, with some of the biggest drops involving “discourtesy” and “offensive language,” new data show. In the past month alone, the number of gripes about rude cops dropped 41.8 percent, from 249 to just 145, according to the most recent numbers compiled by the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

So Linc Chafee is in the race. This brings the number of contenders up to four. You have an embittered, kleptocratic and entitled Social Security recipient; you have a sex-obsessed, corrupt septuagenarian Socialist; you have a big city machine Progressive; and you have the Wonder-Bread-and-Velveeta pragmatist. Of this crew, the only one that is a real contender is Martin O’Malley. But the real reason this bunch of northeastern Progressive white guys are in the race is to give the illusion that Hillary is not cruising to a coronation. There is undoubtedly some hope, too, that inevitable debates with one or...

Where 'Crime' is Code for 'Black People': How Would You Caption This Photo from The Wall Street Journal's Story on White New Yorkers Who Hate Mayor de Blasio "I would like to thank the kind people who donated on day five of the fundraising drive on ChaunceyDeVega.com and WARN. Your generosity is extremely appreciated. We are now 50 percent to the goal for our twice-a-year fundraiser. Again, if you, are able, and find value in the space that I have tried to curate here for reasonable and intelligent dialogue at our virtual salon, please throw some change into the donation...

The screaming tabloid headlines harken a darker, scarier time in New York history. “Four more murders in one night,” the New York Post wrote under the grieving loved ones of a shooting victim. The front page of The Daily News blared “Subway Crime Soars.” In reality, the uptick in violence is small. But even the perception that New York is suffering any sort of backslide into the violence-plagued bad old days of the 1970s has empowered critics of Mayor Bill de Blasio. De Blasio has assured the public that overall crime is down and that measures are already being put...

Early-state Democrats are evenly divided over whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign should be worried about recent polls showing her highest unfavorability ratings in years. Exactly 50 percent say there’s cause for concern while the other 50 percent saw no reason for alarm. [Snip] “Twenty-plus Republicans beating her up, Elizabeth Warren talking about the working man issues that terrify her, a couple of candidates like Bernie [Sanders] and Martin [O’Malley] to fill in her policy blanks and a media that feels stiffed by her lack of access, so all we can focus on is emails and the notorious Clinton Foundation and newly...

On the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the breakdown of the black family in urban ghettos, Baltimore has descended into the tragic violence and chaos he predicted. In a report titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan, warned that the deterioration of the black family, would result in soaring crime rates if it continued unchecked. In the most famous passage of the 1965 report, Moynihan, who would later become a Democratic U.S. senator, wrote, “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los...

Wall Street wants Michael Bloomberg to run for president, but the billionaire isn't budging. At the Yale CEO Summit this week, the talk was of "drafting Bloomberg" however possible. The former New York City mayor seems like the perfect solution for Wall Street's problems with the current field of presidential candidates. The Street sees him as a centrist technocrat who adeptly managed one of the most complex cities in the world. They think he understands the global business community. Rumblings about a Bloomberg run are especially strong at several bulge bracket banks, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Merrill once...

A New York City police officer is accused of stealing credit card information from a dead man she'd been asked to check on and using it to purchase a diamond ring, authorities say. The accused officer, 30-year-old Ymmacula Pierre, was on the job when she went to an apartment building on East 14th Street in Union Square last July to conduct a wellness check requested by the tenant's family, prosecutors said.

How interesting. Obama’s DOJ would apparently like America to just be overrun with criminals who think they can do whatever the heck they want, because, hey, Obama told the cops not to bother chasing them, because we have to reduce police shootings? Hell no: The Washington Post decided to investigate and come up with a tally of all the police involved shootings for 2015, apparently to not only answer the burning demands of the public, but to pick apart the data and draw some conclusions. I was expecting a deafening volume of hyperbole out of this report – and there...

BARBRA STREISAND will use her upcoming autobiography to blow up archenemy Hillary Clinton’s White House campaign, The National ENQUIRER has exclusively learned. The $25 million tell-all is due to be published in 2017, but sources said the devious diva will leak a sensational account about her long-rumored affair with former President Bill Clinton just ahead of the 2016 election! “Barbra is out to torpedo Hillary’s campaign!” a source told The ENQUIRER. “She doesn’t get angry, she gets even."

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Rev. Al Sharpton took aim at Cleveland's 2016 Republican National Convention in front of a packed house at Cleveland's Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on Friday night, speaking for nearly an hour. "Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and them think they are going to come in here and have four or five days of convention," Sharpton said. "We are going to have another convention outside."